PurplePrice Mag · · 3 min read
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The Roycrofters were the members of Roycroft, a community of craftsmen and artists founded in 1895 in East Aurora, a village near Buffalo in New York State. It was one of the most important centres of the Arts and Crafts movement in the United States. Its founder was Elbert Hubbard, a former sales executive who had made his career selling soap for the Larkin company of Buffalo, and who left business to devote himself to writing and craft.
From the press to the community
It all began with books. Hubbard could not find a publisher for his Little Journeys, short biographies of famous people, and decided to print them himself. His model was William Morris's Kelmscott Press: fine paper, careful typography, decorated initials, leather bindings. The name Roycroft came from Samuel and Thomas Roycroft, seventeenth-century London printers, though Hubbard read it as "king's craft". The press also published Hubbard's magazines, The Philistine, bound in butcher paper, and The Fra. In 1899 it issued his most famous essay, A Message to Garcia, reprinted in millions of copies.
Around the press grew workshops for bookbinding, leather, furniture and metalwork. By around 1910 almost 500 people lived and worked at Roycroft, and in 1905 the Roycroft Inn opened to accommodate visitors. Its creed, taken from John Ruskin, called for work done with "head, hand and heart".
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Mission furniture and hammered copper
From the early 1900s Roycroft produced furniture in the style Americans call Mission: solid oak, simple square forms, exposed mortise-and-tenon joints and hammered copper hardware. Each piece was carved with the Roycroft name or the orb and cross mark. The Copper Shop, founded by Karl Kipp, made hand-hammered lamps, vases, bookends and trays. The graphic artist Dard Hunter, who designed books, leaded glass and objects at Roycroft, admired Josef Hoffmann and the Vienna Secession and brought a geometric touch to his work. He later became one of the leading authorities on handmade paper.
The end
On 7 May 1915 Elbert Hubbard and his wife Alice Moore Hubbard, a writer and suffragist, died in the sinking of the liner Lusitania, torpedoed by a German submarine off the coast of Ireland. Their son Bert carried on the business and even tried selling the furniture by mail order through Sears, Roebuck, but the community slowly declined until it closed in 1938. The Roycroft Campus, with its restored Inn, has been a National Historic Landmark since 1986 and can still be visited today.
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